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The OECD secretariat has updated its forecasts for member countries and extended the forecast period to the 2013 Calendar Year. Happily it is also forecasting GDP growth for some of the major countries that are not members of the OECD.

This Friday’s graph shows the implied cumulative growth in real GDP between 2008 and 2013 for these countries, and for groups of these countries. The purpose is to compare how well the different countries are faring and are expected to fare up to 2013 since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.

- click to enlarge

The graph shows that Australia and New Zealand are doing well compared to the OECD average. Europe is doing very poorly, and Greece is an economic disaster. At the other end of the scale, the growth in China, India and Indonesia is quite phenomenal. Note too that during this period Turkey, Chile, Korea, Brazil, Israel and Poland (in that order) all outscore Australia, which is followed by Mexico and then New Zealand.

On 5 December this week the OECD reported that the gap between rich and poor in OECD countries has reached its highest level for over 30 years. Its press release here called for governments to act quickly to tackle inequality. The full report is “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising”.

The New Zealand media was (commendably) quick to latch onto the chart in the press release that indicated that the degree of inequality appeared to have increased the most for New Zealand between ‘the mid-1980s and late 2000s’. (For the record, when the data behind the chart is downloaded and examined, Sweden narrowly tips New Zealand out of first slot on this measure.)

Despite some of the rhetoric apparently to the contrary in the press release, the OECD’s analysis, conclusions and recommendations look very orthodox and commendable – the way to help people at the bottom of the income distribution is to improve their educational and workplace opportunities. Here are some quotes:

“The main driver behind rising income gaps has been greater inequality in wages and salaries, as the high-skilled have benefitted more from technological progress than the low-skilled. Reforms to boost competition and to make labour markets more adaptable, for example by promoting part-time work or more flexible hours, have promoted productivity and brought more people into work, especially women and low-paid workers. But the rise in part-time and low-paid work also extended the wage gap.”

“Investing in human capital is essential to promote employment and employability, and to tackle inequality. Indeed, our report clearly indicates that up-skilling of the workforce is by far the most powerful instrument to counter rising inequality.”

“The single most important factor to both reduced wage dispersion amongst workers and higher unemployment rates is educational attainment.”

“The evolution of earnings inequality across OECD countries in recent decades could be viewed mainly … as “a race between education and technology”.

The report also finds that, compared with market returns, government tax and spending policies generally do have an overall redistributive effect in favour of the lowest income distribution groups. Again this finding is unexceptional. Those who are on benefits and not working obviously do not earn a market income from wages.

What the figures do not, and cannot, show, is the effect of tax and spending policies on the lowest income distribution groups compared to policies that are more likely to help them move out of poverty and up the employment ladder. These include greater diversity and flexibility in education, a welfare system that does not trap people on benefits through high effective marginal tax rates, and the removal of barriers to employment of young, unskilled, would-be workers, such as high minimum wages.

But all these observations and findings apply regardless of the size of the income gap or whether it is widening or narrowing!

A key problem with the focus on income gaps rather than on improving the skill attainment and job prospects for those currently at the bottom is that it panders to the absurd Marxist notion that the rich have somehow got rich at the expense of the poor. Yet there is no basis for saying that people who are not working are poor because others are earning good incomes by working hard and productively. Wealth generation is not a zero sum game.

Another key problem is that the OECD’s measure of inequality proposes that New Zealanders would be just as well off if everyone were poor as they would be if everyone were rich. This is because the only thing that matters under this measure is equality of outcome. The ideal income distribution is reached when differences in effort and skill go unrewarded. Those who work hard should earn no more than the most idle in the community.

It is a curious thing that the OECD considers this proposition to be so unexceptional as to be not worth drawing to anyone’s attention in its press release.